Actually, for New Orleanians, the show never really stopped.  Production for season two started shortly after season one ended.  The program that made mold spots into Pollock paintings and Mardi Gras Indians into national heroes has turned my city into a Hollywood backlot.  Some streets have been off-limits for weeks. The cast haunts my favorite coffeehouses.  My ‘secret’ dive bars have become boho refuges.

And everyone seems to love it.

My neighbors vie to be extras. Not for the $100 a day, but to be part of it.

The it refers to a potent brew of film production incentives and tourism economics that has become a religion for recovery post-Katrina. These halleluiahs pre-date the storm.  Film production has a hundred-year history, mainly due to the combination of exotic locales, cheap labor, and fair winter weather.  Beginning in 2002, the state fortified its faith in Hollywood with generous tithes of tax incentives that today refund approximately one of every three dollars that major studios spent on productions.  Meanwhile, the slow erosion of shipping and oil revenues in the 1980s has made tourism the number one local industry.  City officials reminded locals to tell the world that despite the chaos and mayhem, tourist dollars would heal our wounded city.

Together, the city wrapped its troubles in the dreams of a film production economy that would drive tourism.  Then came along a Hollywood series by a veritable auteur who threw a spotlight on everything unique about New Orleans public culture: the music, the food, the funky cottages, the dancing in the streets, and the ‘fun’ in the funerals. The disaster tours have rerouted to see the places featured in the series.  Praise Treme.

The real troubles wait for when the crews leave the neighborhoods gentrified and the authenticated culture overexposed in an infrastructure robbed of those Hollywood tax dollars.

I saw another billboard on the road, ironically, on my way to the airport.  “Be a Tourist in Your Own Hometown,” it read.  As citizens wrap their troubles in the dreams of an unproblematic marriage of film and tourism, we become not unlike tourists.  We focus on the fleeting fun of producing those images of us, while ignoring the production policies that enable their economic power.  And we dream our troubles away.

The CBS sports commentator who concluded, “Tonight the City of New Orleans embraced football,” doesn’t know the first thing about television reception.  On Superbowl Sunday 2010, viewers saw how a football team has embraced a city and its culture for decades.  Let me give some context.

First, this is how we watched the game.  Gold lamé and tutus, and the women dressed up too.  At the cincher play, an interception returned for a 74-yard touchdown, Deutsches Haus turned off the TV audio and played “When the Saints Come Marchin’ In” for a carnival parade of kings and queens, nuns and burlesque fairies waving white handkerchiefs high.  Mardi Gras, for the uninitiated, is a season here, not a day.  We’d been dressed out since morning for the four Sunday parades, including the all-dog Krewe of Barkus, strolling aptly to “When the Dogs Go Barking In.”

Television didn’t unify us.  The city has been on a high since the election results rolled in 15-hours earlier.  For the first time in recent memory, voters crossed racial lines en masse to elect a white mayor and a multiracial city council.  Television coverage of the city since Katrina has stressed divisions, ignoring the hybrid spaces and collaborative times that form a historically public culture.

Then, we danced downtown.  We took the “neutral ground,” a local word for the median that dates to colonial days as the place where French and Spaniards could meet without a turf scuffle.  In the street-turned-parking-lot, a black woman of maybe 60 years jumped out of her sedan and met in a jubilant squeeze with my towering white guy friend.  It was the first of many hugs, kisses, and high-fives with complete strangers that night.

Over the past four decades, the Saints became part of a public culture that erupts in New Orleans, a gumbo roux (locals, please pardon the cliché) that spills into the rue citywide.

This was the New Orleans I have always known, the one that drew me here before Katrina and the one that has kept me here.

Though we can always expect a good relationship crisis from the gals, the “Housewife” series on Bravo in 2009 promised all sorts of insights into market crisis. There were short-sales on housewife houses in Atlanta and Orange County.  The New York elite kvetched about the lack of luster on the donation party circuit. Even the New Jersey series was a strange comment on the economy, focusing on mostly members of one family, as if the state didn’t have enough millionaires to offer up to the masses.

So I’m excited in 2010 to see Tamra, Orange County’s self-proclaimed “hottest” housewife, lose it all week by week in the current season.  First, she has to (shock) go back to work, in real estate of all things.  Happily she chirps about the joys of selling others bargain basement mansions, while her marriage is suddenly falling apart.  The pretext of the discord is Tamra’s friendship with the other women, but the juicy part is that her house, newly renovated in earlier season, is now going to be hocked for nothing to pay the bills and divorce.  Husbands can be replaced apparently, but marble bathrooms!  Tamra tears up just pondering leaving the expensive Coho residence.

Not to fear, however, because, on the housewife series, even crises can be good spending opportunities.  The gals in Orange County are still riding in limos, getting plastic surgery, and going on shopping sprees.  But this season does seem a little less opulent.  The recent lavish event to bring together the couples featured on the show was a Tupperware party of all things.

For longtime viewers as (ahem) myself, you might notice that the price-tags that used to caption nearly everything they did are no longer there.  Should we assume that the fancy trips and opulent objects were not as glamorous as in seasons past?  Were they bought on sale?  Or with a coupon discount?  Worse yet, maybe they were product placements, donated luxury items for the now-poorer, little rich girls of Orange County.

If this keeps up, I’d like to pitch a new housewives twist, one that gives captions as to their real financial conditions.  I’d like to know, for example, the ladies’ liquidity, their accumulated debt, and their credit scores as they squabble over the crumbs of the mortgage meltdowns that have affected every place Bravo seems to have chosen as the hometowns for the bourgeoisie.